The Burning Spear: Being the Experiences of Mr. John Lavender in the Time of War. Galsworthy John
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followed, calling out “Blink!” at the top of his voice. The crowd followed Mr. Lavender, and the old lady followed crowd. Thus they proceeded until the boy, arriving at a small piece of communal water, flung the hat into the middle of it, and, scaling the wall, made a strategic detour and became a disinterested spectator among the crowd. The hat, after skimming the surface of the pond, settled like a water-lily, crown downwards, while Blink, perceiving in all this the hand of her master, stood barking at it wildly. Mr. Lavender arrived at the edge of the pond slightly in advance of the crowd.
“Good Blink!” he said. “Fetch it! Good Blink!”
Blink looked up into his face, and, with the acumen for which her breed is noted, perceiving he desired her to enter the water backed away from it.
“She is not a water dog,” explained Mr. Lavender to the three soldiers in blue clothes.
“Good dog; fetch it!” Blink backed into the soldiers, who, bending down, took her by head tail, threw her into the pond, and encouraged her on with small stones pitched at the hat. Having taken the plunge, the intelligent animal waded boldly to the hat, and endeavoured by barking and making little rushes at it with her nose, to induce it to return to shore.
“She thinks it’s a sheep,” said Mr. Lavender; “a striking instance of hereditary instinct.”
Blink, unable to persuade the hat, mounted it with her fore-paws and trod it under.
“Ooray!” shouted the crowd.
“Give us a shilling, guv’nor, an’ I’ll get it for yer?”
“Thank you, my boy,” said Mr. Lavender, producing a shilling.
The boy – the same boy who had thrown it in – stepped into the water and waded towards the hat. But as he approached, Blink interposed between him and the hat, growling and showing her teeth.
“Does she bite?” yelled the boy.
“Only strangers,” cried Mr. Lavender.
Excited by her master’s appeal, Blink seized the jacket of the boy, who made for the shore, while the hat rested in the centre of the pond, the cynosure of the stones with which the soldiers were endeavouring to drive it towards the bank. By this, time the old lady had rejoined Mr. Lavender.
“Your nice hat she murmured.
“I thank you for your sympathy, madam,” Lavender, running his hand through his hair; “in moments like these one realizes the deep humanity of the British people. I really believe that in no other race could you find such universal interest and anxiety to recover a hat. Say what you will, we are a great nation, who only, need rousing to show our best qualities. Do you remember the words of the editor: ‘In the spavined and spatch-cocked ruin to which our inhuman enemies have reduced civilization, we of the island shine with undimmed effulgence in all those qualities which mark man out from the ravening beast’?”
“But how are you going to get your hat?” asked the old lady.
“I know not,” returned Mr. Lavender, still under the influence of the sentiment he had quoted; “but if I had fifteen hats I would take them all off to the virtues which have been ascribed to the British people by all those great men who have written and spoken since the war began.”
“Yes,” said the old lady soothingly. “But, I think you had better come under my sunshade. The sun is very strong.”
“Madam,” said Mr. Lavender, “you are very good, but your sunshade is too small. To deprive you of even an inch of its shade would be unworthy of anyone in public life.” So saying, he recoiled from the proffered sunshade into the pond, which he had forgotten was behind him.
“Oh, dear!” said the old lady; “now you’ve got your feet wet!”
“It is nothing,” responded Mr. Lavender gallantly. And seeing that he was already wet, he rolled up his trousers, and holding up the tails of his holland coat, turned round and proceeded towards his hat, to the frantic delight of the crowd.
“The war is a lesson to us to make little of little things,” he thought, securing the hat and wringing it out. “My feet are wet, but – how much wetter they would be in the trenches, if feet can be wetter than wet through,” he mused with some exactitude. “Down, Blink, down!” For Blink was plastering him with the water-marks of joy and anxiety. “Nothing is quite so beautiful as the devotion of one’s own dog,” thought Mr. Lavender, resuming the hat, and returning towards the shore. The by-now-considerable throng were watching him with every mark of acute enjoyment; and the moment appeared to Mr. Lavender auspicious for addressing them. Without, therefore, emerging from the pond, which he took for his, platform, he spoke as follows:
“Circumstances over which I have no control have given me the advantage of your presence in numbers which do credit to the heart of the nation to which we all belong. In the midst of the greatest war which ever threatened the principle of Liberty, I rejoice to see so many people able to follow the free and spontaneous impulses of their inmost beings. For, while we must remember that our every hour is at the disposal of our country, we must not forget the maxim of our fathers: ‘Britons never will be slaves.’ Only by preserving the freedom of individual conscience, and at the same time surrendering it whole-heartedly to every which the State makes on us, can we hope defeat the machinations of the arch enemies of mankind.”
At this moment a little stone hit him sharply on the hand.
“Who threw that stone?” said Mr. Lavender. “Let him stand out.”
The culprit, no other indeed than he who had thrown the hat in, and not fetched it out for a shilling, thus menaced with discovery made use of a masterly device, and called out loudly:
“Pro-German!”
Such was the instinctive patriotism of the crowd that the cry was taken up in several quarters; and for the moment Mr. Lavender remained speechless from astonishment. The cries of “Pro-German!” increased in volume, and a stone hitting her on the nose caused Blink to utter a yelp; Mr. Lavender’s eyes blazed.
“Huns!” he cried; “Huns! I am coming out.”
With this prodigious threat he emerged from the pond at the very moment that a car scattered the throng, and a well-known voice said:
“Well, sir, you ‘ave been goin’ it!”
“Joe,” said Mr. Lavender, “don’t speak to me!”
“Get in.”
“Never!”
“Pro-Germans!” yelled the crowd.
“Get in!” repeated Joe.
And seizing Mr. Lavender as if collaring him at football, he knocked off his hat, propelled him into the car, banged the door, mounted, and started at full speed, with Blink leaping and barking in front of them.
Debouching from Piave Parade into Bottomley Lane he drove up it till the crowd was but a memory before he stopped to examine the condition his master. Mr. Lavender was hanging out of window, looking back, and shivering violently.
“Well, sir,” said Joe. “I don’t think!”
“Joe,” said Mr. Lavender that crowd ought not to be at large. They were manifestly Huns.
“The speakin’s been a bit too much for you, sir,” said Joe. “But you’ve got it off your chest, anyway.”
Mr. Lavender regarded him for a moment in silence; then putting his hand to his throat, said hoarsely:
“No, on my chest, I think, Joe. All public speakers do. It is inseparable from that great calling.”
“‘Alf a mo’!” grunted Joe, diving into the recesses beneath the driving-seat. “‘Ere, swig that off, sir.”
Mr. Lavender raised the tumbler of fluid to his mouth, and drank it off; only from the dregs left on his moustache did he perceive that it smelled of rum and honey.
“Joe,” he said reproachfully, “you have made me break my pledge.”
Joe